Bring your bike and join up with Social Cycling NYC (@socialcyclingnyc on instagram: https://imginn.com/p/DNhbKgMMXRf/) to support DOT redesign of Astoria 31st Street to improve safety and cycling accessibility (catchup on the news: https://piefed.ca/post/151967). Meet at Columbus Circle, Thursday 8/21 7pm, head for Astoria at 7:30pm.
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33rd st makes more sense overall though?
in addition 8ft for parking lanes means no handicapped parking at all anywhere as most van setups need more than 8feet. Many larger cars are 9 feet wide so where do sprinter vans and the like go?
Bad ideas all around here, it’s as if no one talked to a civil engineer first
I agree, there should not be a parking lane. Storing private cars in the middle of a main street in a busy business district? Total misappropriation of space, and dangerous to boot as they block sight lines in an area already visually cluttered with columns. Remove the parking lane and use that space for passenger dropoff and business deliveries. I’ve never seen a business van use a regular parking spot to offload, they always have to double park because parking is always full.
Having one side of parking might be a good stepping stone to face less opposition than going from both sides to no sides.
For deliveries, maybe a break in the parking for periodic unloading zones? Alternatively, restrict deliveries to a time period? That might be logistically difficult though.
Or just have the bike lane be on 33rd street. It fixes all of the issues while only slightly inconveniencing cyclists.
If there was enough parking in Astoria I would be inclined to agree but relocating this to a different street solves this issue.
Thank you for admitting that all that nimbys care about is personal parking, and any concerns about “safety” or “deliveries” is just smokescreen. You can’t solve this issue by relocating loading zones to 33rd Street!
I saw the situation on 31st for myself yesterday, and there is a 5-block stretch where repainting work was almost completed. So the cagers park bumper-to-bumper in the new bike lane, of course, because “it is not official yet”, AND ALSO park in the new between-columns marked parking spots. There was not a single spot to make deliveries or drop off passengers! Entire street filled with double parking on both sides. This is what cagers want. Long-term storage for their cars in 4 rows on a main business street. “Just one more parking space bro” will not solve this.
If you want to quadruple-park, just go do it on 33rd Street. I keep hearing there is a lot of space there.
I thought 9’ wide was a bit hyperbolic so I looked into it. My initial thought was that a full size pickup truck would be 8’ wide with something like an Escalade to be the runner up.
I was right about the pickup but I’d forgotten the existence of high end sports cars which are wider than an SUV which is crazy.
Insofar as handicap vans go, the ones I’ve noticed around here unload either at the back or out the passenger side, directly onto the sidewalk so I don’t think width of that lane would be much an issue in this case.
The unloading area would be into a lane or a sidewalk. It needs to be street level.
33rd street is a better choice because it does not gave the subway. It is slightly less convenient for bikers but better and safer overall.
For your first argument, handicap spaces need to be 8ft for cars, 11ft for vans. For both, they also require a 5ft isle, the same length as the space, to one side of the vehicle. For van spaces, this is a total of 16 ft. This is a good point, and worth mentioning here. I’d imagine the folks on bikes wouldn’t mind if, around handicapped spaces, their bike path went down to 6ft or 3ft wide. I know that as an avid bike commuter I wouldn’t mind, even if I had to wait a few minutes for someone to exit their vehicle before continuing on my way.
Your second point however is completely wrong. Most consumer vehicles do not get wider than 8ft. No road-legal vehicles are 9 ft wide by law. Sprinter vans are actually a lot thinner than you think, not even 7ft. Semis can’t legally be any wider than 8.5ft. That puts them past the 8ft mark, but if commercial vehicles got the approval to be ~1ft into the buffer I think that everyone would be fine with that.
Considering you got half of your argument completely wrong, it’s hard to take you seriously, because that means you are arguing in bad faith. You present yourself as having the knowledge of a civil engineer, yet you just pick a number at random that supports your argument, even though it’s a complete lie?